As I have written and spoken about many times, including earlier this year here, if you are looking for a new healthy eating habit, eliminating soda from your diet is a great place to start.
To be clear: this means all kinds of soda, including diet soda, and there is important news supporting this position on diet soda.
As reported in one of my go-to health newsletters from Dr. Gabe Mirkin, “Many research papers have associated artificial sweeteners with increased risk for cancer, weight gain and diabetes, but nobody yet has proven that artificial sweeteners cause these conditions” until recently when researchers showed “taking artificial sweeteners causes toxic bacteria to overgrow in the colon and produce chemicals that are harmful to humans.”
Dr. Mirkin also repeats previous reporting: “artificial sweeteners appear to make you hungry so that you eat more food, which increases risk for weight gain and diabetes.”
It’s understandable that making the switch from soda isn’t easy. I recommend making the transition easier by doing it in steps. For example, start with a combination of seltzer and orange juice that you find tolerable—perhaps 50% of each. Stick with that for the 21 days it takes to turn it into a habit.
It’s important to move on from this step because, as I have written in more than one post, including here: juice has nearly as much sugar as soda.
After the first 21 days, reduce the amount of orange juice and increase the amount of seltzer again, for example to 75% seltzer, 25% orange juice.
After that becomes a habit, move on to even less juice. Perhaps just a splash of juice, or even just a squeeze of a lemon.
How did you make the switch from diet soda? Please join the conversation with your comments…
Best regards,
David